Lady @Lady@cat.family

@inherentlee or you could update it :) it is not a bad thing to learn in public

@inherentlee here is what i am getting

if it is confusing to you how this works, i recommend getting out a piece of paper and trying to render it by hand so that you understand what the computer is doing

@inherentlee i forgot a position: absolute on the ::before and ::after is the issue

@inherentlee why not use characters? because it depends on font support and users have a wide variety of fonts available on their computer. users might have font size or letter spacing variation as well, for accessibility or personal aesthetic reasons. you have hardcoded a border size of .095rem and a offset of -.34rem but these values only work on your machine. they do not necessarily work on other peoples. here is what your table of contents looks like on my computer

@inherentlee i wouldn¦t use box drawing characters for this; css is already very good at drawing boxes

in this case you need to draw two boxes, one shaped like an L which is half the height of a line, and one shaped like an I which extends for the entire list item (unless it is the last list item)

so

li{ Position: Relative; Padding-Inline-Start: 1EM }
li::before,li::after{ Display: Block; Box-Sizing: Border-Box; Inset-Block: 0 Auto; Inset-Inline: 0 Auto; Inline-Size: .75EM /* or whatever */; Border-Inline-Start: 1PX Solid }
li::before{ Block-Size: .5LH; Border-Block-End: 1PX Solid; Content: "" }
li:Not(:Last-Child)::after{ Block-Size: 100%; Content: "" }

[note: above code is untested, i just threw it together to demonstrate the idea, it may not entirely work]

the biggest lesson personally for me has been that the people who pour the most energy into hospitality are usually abusers. hospitality is a great way to build followings and social capital. and when i think of the people who had the biggest impact on early mastodon, many of them did eventually end up hurting a lot of people and crashing out and splitting on the platform. for you know, diagnosed personality disorder reasons. the ones that didn¦t, who were stable and goodhearted, were usually the targets. so you know. gotta figure out how to fix that

i think the most annoying piece of cognitive dissonance with the fediverse today is that there is no reason why it couldn¦t be good. when mastodon first launched it was an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis and there was one timeline and none of the good and useful features you take for granted today. but people still built a strong and resilient community, because they wanted to

you could do that now. you could make a server and be welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and resilient community, and be an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis, and if like five servers did that you would have roughly the same constellation that was the fediverse in its heyday that everyone misses. but nobody wants to, because it isn¦t new and interesting anymore. it is just work. the end

the fediverse sucks because all the hospitality workers burned out and never sought replacements, or were evil people to begin with, or stopped caring once all their friends were on the platform

did @coriander write this comic

if you ever wonder why millennials are all like this the answer is because we all read Frindle

@gaditb but, importantly, you can be a hypertext document connected to other hypertext documents with·out following standards, and that is probably still participating in the big web even if it is standing apart from the little one

@gaditb well, i think there are two competing definitions here

there is a big “web”, which is anything which is arguably hypertext and which participates in the hypertext universe of the Internet

but there is also a smaller “web”, which is a set of social norms and conventions (including file formats and standards) for those hypertext documents

i don¦t buy the argument that the web should not have standards, but then the question remains as to what the scope of those standards should be? (which presumably is also the scope of web browsers)

@gaditb as an example question that is hard to resolve given the history of the web and browsers: are R·S·S feeds part of the web?

@gaditb the problem is that our conceptualization of “the web” has largely been created and directed by web browser manufacturers, who have had bad ideas about it

i used to think web browsers were cool and now i hate them. whose fault is this? everybodys